The pen to paper... again

I have noticed a fair amount of my fellow writers have tended to speak of their characters as they would a friend, and often wrote little snippets of dialogue between them and themselves, an idea I found fascinating. It also prompted the question, "Do my characters come to life like that?" Overall, I believe the answer is "Yes," but as I thought about it, I realized that my latest characters, two assassins sent to kill each other, were actually rather flat and undimensional. Part of the reason was because they were so similar; I had failed to create distinct personalities for them, instead classifying them together in the stereotypical "Blunt, cynical, hardened warrior" section. Looking again at the novel I wrote last November, which had five unique and well-developed characters written in the space of a month, and comparing them with these two, which I had spent considerably longer with, I realized my error. I had not lived with these characters like I had my four Freeborn and one Freegiven. Spending each night from nine to midnight with them, I had found out what them different from each other, what they liked and disliked, what made the tick, and what their weaknesses and strengths were. Redpaw and Crestlen hadn't had that luxury. So I spent the next hour or so jotting down their differences, revisiting my plotline to rediscover where I wanted to go with my story, and in general gaining a fresh perspective on my story.
About this time I decided I wanted to revisit an old story I had written, my second ever to be precise, and the one I had spent the most time with. The plot was non-existant, but the characters were real, again, because I had spent so much time with them. Their names were synonymous with writing to me, Rogart, Falkar, Dakar, Soltice, they were far more real to me than any other character I've read or written about. Unfortunately, due to the non-existance of the plot to go along with the characters, they have sat for some years, growing rather dusty with disuse. But the yesterday I decided to pull them out again, place them in a new world, give them a real and interesting storyline and re-establish their prominence as my first true characters. Their story, once The Warrior in Grey, will be renamed Silver and Sable and will be the novel I write during November (50,000+ words in 30 days!!)
So, for the month between now and then, I shall prepare in every way possible for that story, as well as continuing to flesh out Redpaw and Crestlen, and make them just as real as their predecessors.


And in the paragraphs above I have just proved both the point and worth of this blog: a notebook to jot down my thoughts as I think them, and a treasure chest to unlock in the future and read back through my trains of thought. May I continue the pattern henceforward.

In His Service,

Farjag, the scribbler